When Barack Obama came to Colorado during the campaign to talk about education, he didn’t visit a traditional public school. Instead, he went to the Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts.
Candidate Obama praised the public school, which serves a high-poverty, urban and recent-immigration population, and celebrated its leader, Michael Johnston, for getting all 44 of his graduating seniors into college.
Candidate Obama also praised Denver Public Schools’ performance pay plan, known as ProComp, throughout the campaign.
But will President Obama pick an education secretary to champion those reformist ideals? Someone who will overturn the status quo that’s paralyzing American schools?
Or will he side with the more traditional, heavyweight teachers union folks?
A battle has been brewing for weeks among Democrats over what type of education secretary Obama would select. His selection of Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford educator, to head his education transition team, rankled some reformers. Darling-Hammond has been a critic of Teach for America, the reform project that produced Mapleton’s Johnston and high-profile reformers such as Washington, D.C.’s Michelle Rhee, featured on the cover of last week’s Time.
“I’m here to hold up this school and these students as an example of what’s possible in education if we’re willing . . . to try new ideas and new reforms based not on ideology, but on what works to give our children the best possible chance in life,” Obama said last May at Mapleton.
But Obama, a master politician, deftly walked the tightrope between the two camps throughout the campaign, keeping teachers unions in his corner with shouts of higher pay and less focus on testing, while also appeasing reformers.
Obama must choose a reformer.
The stakes are immense.
Dropout rates are too high. American youngsters can’t compete with their global peers in key subject areas. China and India are graduating more students from college than the U.S. And many of those students speak English.
Education is the underpinning of our future and our economic future.
Just look at last week’s news. The Big Three automakers are downshifting, and those highly compensated manufacturing jobs of yesterday are just that — yesterday’s jobs.
Tomorrow’s jobs will go to the creative thinkers, those trained to adapt to a changing world and workforce.
And we can’t prepare for tomorrow using yesterday’s education model. Even Bill Gates last week called on Obama and Congress to not only expand support for education but make the federal government “a dynamic agent of school reform.”
It’s the only way.
Obama, who has vowed to recruit an “army of new teachers,” increase funding and create better tests, must choose a reformer as his education secretary. His old friend Arne Duncan, chief executive of the Chicago public school system and charter school proponent, is one possible pick.
There are other candidates who would be even bolder choices — if Obama is willing to rock the boat. We don’t think he has any other choice.
